#tbt just call me shamu

Fat kids don't really know that they are overweight at first.  It's not like they stand in front of the mirror scrutinizing every detail of their appearance thinking to themselves, "I just need to do something about this double chin!"

I don't know.  Maybe they do.  Hopefully things haven't changed that much since I was in elementary school.

I was thin until I hit puberty and a flood of raging hormones hit me like a horde of furious rhinos.  It was at this time that the anxieties really went into full swing as well and I started to gain weight.  I'm telling you, they are connected.

For a fleeting moment, the image of myself I pictured in my mind didn't match up with the reflection in the mirror and I didn't know I was fat.

Kids at school ensured that moment was brief.

Like most my age, I hung around with a pack of kids from my street after school.  We were a strange group of children with a wide range of ages, interests, and hobbies.  But like most groups of kids, there was the neighborhood bully.

My dad recounted the story of a bully he knew as a kid who would taunt his friends and him, trying to lure them into fisticuffs by chanting, "Come on buddy.  Come on."  Ours was a mean blonde kid who terrorized people on his bike and whose sister was even meaner and jumped on my head once after she convinced me to sit underneath their trampoline.

One summery evening a feud had erupted between the boys and the girls and I was somehow drawn into the fracas.  I don't remember at all what the commotion was about but names were being hurled back and forth and I'm sure I got involved.  Finally, the neighborhood bully yelled back at me...

"Shut up you beached whale!"

For a while there I had to think about it.  Whales were pretty cool animals in my book and I had recently traveled to San Antonio to see Shamu at Seaworld.  Why would he call me a whale and what did beached mean anyway?

Then it clicked.

He thought I was fat!

At that moment, my mental self portrait updated to a more current picture and I realized that I was indeed fat.  The mirror in my mind's eye was shattered and I never really looked at myself in the same way again.

To this day I feel sympathy for whales, especially the beached ones.